Housing Plans Irk Students, Masters

By the summer of 2007, Dunster, Mather, and Leverett Houses are set to have a new next-door neighbor—a six-story graduate student housing complex on Cowperthwaite Street.

Construction will begin this August and continue through the school year, with work starting at 8 a.m. Monday through Friday, a schedule that has sparked undergraduate opposition to the project.

“The rest of my Harvard experience will be filled with noise,” Leverett House resident Yomari Chavez ’07 told a group of 19 students who met earlier this month to plan a strategy for bringing their concerns to University administrators’ attention.

After visiting University President Lawrence H. Summers at his office hours last Wednesday, students plan to meet with Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby and Deputy Dean of the College Patricia D. O’Brien this week.

The rooms that will bear the brunt of the construction noise have become less desirable in housing lotteries. Students also object to the size of the building, and they complain that they weren’t informed about the plans earlier.

But graduate students say the building will provide much-needed relief in the tight Cambridge housing market and argue that undergraduates don’t fully understand their plight.

“They sometimes forget that they are part of a larger community at Harvard,” says Kennedy School of Government student Tonya M. Cropper. “We’re not just there to service them as TFs.”

After the University spent years negotiating to balance the needs of graduate students and neighborhood residents, undergraduates are now demanding that their voices be heard as well.

While students say it may be too late to drastically alter the construction plans, they hope their efforts will give undergraduates a seat at the decision-making table in the future.

YEARS IN THE MAKING

The University has long viewed the parking lot across from Dunster and Mather as a valuable spot for development, but resistance from neighbors stalled plans until October 2003, when Harvard and the city signed an agreement that would allow Harvard to expand on the site and other properties in the Riverside neighborhood.

The agreement permits Harvard to construct 328 housing units on two sites in Riverside in exchange for providing a public park and 36 affordable housing units for city residents.

In December 2004, the Cambridge Planning Board unanimously approved Harvard’s plans.

Economics graduate student Raven E. Saks, who serves on the housing committee of the Graduate Student Council (GSC), says she was invited to meet with Harvard Real Estate Services (HRES) officials to discuss plans for the Cowperthwaite Street building over a year ago.

But Leverett House Master Howard Georgi ’68 wrote in an e-mail that, while he was aware that construction was planned for the site, he wasn’t shown designs until February­—despite efforts to meet with HRES officials before then.

According to Harvard spokeswoman Lauren Marshall, University officials have met with House masters in recent months and distributed an information packet to students in April. HRES representatives also visited Dunster Dining Hall in April to meet with students.

“Regretfully, these discussions didn’t take place earlier in the process,” Marshall wrote in an e-mail.

DEVELOPING CONCERNS

While Georgi wrote that he recognizes a “critical need for new graduate student housing,” he added that student input might have improved the plans.

“I certainly believe that if students, tutors, and Masters of the neighboring Houses had not been kept out of the loop, the planning of the project and the final plan would have been very different,” he wrote.

Students also criticize the lack of communication between the undergraduates and the administration.

“What we are asking is that the University involve students in discussing something that will impact their lives this much,” says Dunster House resident Natalie M. Orr ’06. “We only found out about this when it was too late.”

In their meetings with administrators, students are asking the University to decrease the building’s height and width in order to preserve the open space next to Leverett House and ensure that the area is well-lit.

Students have also complained about the impacts of construction, saying that they are already being awakened by preliminary soil testing on the site.

All the rooms in Mather and Dunster that face the site on Cowperthwaite Street, as well as much of Leverett F and G towers, will be subject to “high impact noise” between September and next June, according to the packet given to students in April.

Students say the construction altered the usual preferences in housing lotteries.

“K entryway, the one that’s furthest out, usually has some of the best senior doubles. This year, nobody took a senior room,” Orr says of the Dunster housing lottery.

Marshall says the University will have a construction mitigation team on site to respond to complaints during the building process. While most construction in the city begins at 7 a.m., work on Cowperthwaite Street will begin an hour later. If work is necessary on Saturday, it will not start until 9 a.m.

The University will also create a new Harvard University Police Department station and shuttle stop on Cowperthwaite Street, according to Marshall.

This is not the only area on campus where construction will impact student life next year.

Due to renovation of the Hasty Pudding building, parts of Apley Court and Claverly Hall will go vacant next year. According to College Housing Officer Sue Watts, students from Adams and Lowell House living in Claverly will be redistributed to DeWolfe, and other Lowell students will be moved to the part of Apley Court that does not face the construction.

Watts says she does not have additional information on the impact that the Cowperthwaite construction will have on undergraduate housing.

SCRAMBLE FOR SPACE

University officials have emphasized that more graduate student housing is necessary in order to stay competitive with peer institutions.

A survey of graduate students conducted by the University in 2001 revealed that only 38 percent of graduate students live in Harvard-owned housing, although 75 percent would like to do so.

The Cowperthwaite project represents just one part of the University’s thrust to house 50 percent of its graduate students by 2011.

Incoming graduate students are not guaranteed housing and many arrive without a clear sense of where they will be living. Renting off-campus apartments can require having a significant amount of cash up front, which some graduate students say they do not have on reserve.

“I have a daughter—I’m a single parent—and I didn’t have thousands of dollars up front, so I was really counting on a Harvard apartment,” says Cropper, who ended up getting space in Harvard housing.

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Dean Peter T. Ellison wrote in an e-mail that schools such as MIT, Princeton, and Stanford are all taking steps to reduce the housing crunch for graduate students.

“Like our peers, we do not want to see the population of GSAS graduate students driven by housing costs and availability farther and farther from the campus,” wrote Ellison, who serves on the Faculty Advisory Committee on the University’s “Fair Market Rent” policy.

Undergraduate organizers originally questioned the decision to house graduate students on Cowperthwaite Street, saying it would further isolate Dunster and Mather Houses from the rest of the undergraduate community.

The building is zoned specifically for graduate students after lobbying by neighbors, who feared late-night noise and were upset by the conversion of DeWolfe into undergraduate housing after the University promised it would be for graduate students and junior faculty.

According to Ellison, the design of the new building leaves open the possibility of converting it to undergraduate use in the future.

“If the Quad was converted to graduate student housing, the [Cowperthwaite Street] building could be readily converted to ‘suites’ and added to Leverett or one of the other nearby houses for undergraduate occupancy,” Ellison wrote.

For now, though, Dunster House resident Iliana Montauk ’06 says students recognize that graduate students will be living in the building, and are focusing on concerns that they believe the building’s future inhabitants might share.

“If we had our dream world, we wouldn’t have it be graduate student housing. But we’re not the only people at this University,” Montauk says. “Aesthetically, [graduate students] probably wouldn’t want the building to be as tall as it’s planned to be either.”

But the undergraduates’ complaints about the new building have left some graduate students feeling that their needs are not being valued.

“I hope the undergraduates will just appreciate what [the building] might mean to the graduate students and especially the graduate student families who live there,” says Ryan J. Larsen, an applied physics graduate student who currently lives in Belmont.

As the University seeks to finalize its construction plans and mediate between the needs of undergraduates, graduates, and neighbors, Saks says people on all sides will need to compromise.

“The University is clearly putting a lot of effort into trying to make the best outcome possible,” Saks says. “Honestly, I just think these issues are really difficult and there are always people who are going to be made worse off.”

—Staff writer Katherine M. Gray can be reached at kmgray@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Natalie I. Sherman can be reached at nsherman@fas.harvard.edu.